Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Review)

Expectations can be a dangerous thing. As a rule, it's generally good to keep them as low as possible when approaching a new experience. It's something akin to starting a painting with a blank canvas; and can be especially important when a medium has a scant two hours to make an impression on the viewer. Unfortunately, when it comes to film, low expectations don't sell tickets (barring the obvious exception of Michael Bay movies). It is the job of the Hollywood hype machine to inflate expectations past the tipping point of a ticket sale.

Speaking of which... Have a trailer:


No expectation inflation was needed for my viewing of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. The Mission: Impossible series has been one of my absolute favorites since I was a young lad blissfully developing a thumb callous from the rewind button on my VHS player, watching 1996's Mission: Impossible over and over.

When Mission: Impossible II was released, I had no idea that John Woo was the best action director to ever walk the earth. I was twelve. Forgive me. I now understand why the overbearing melodrama somehow blended so perfectly with the gloriously absurd action sequences. Even though the sequel began the series' decent from intelligent, old-school spy thriller to mindless blockbuster action, it holds a very special place in my heart.

The third entry in the series was so brutally efficient that it was easy to overlook that it lacked the first film's intrigue and the second's style. Despite this, it remains the best film in the series sheerly due to it's impenetrable solidity; while not particularly memorable, it lacks any noteworthy flaws, and is so savagely paced that it would be hard to notice any flaws or remember much of anything.

When advanced reviews proclaimed that the numeral-eschewing fourth film in the series, Ghost Protocol, was the best of the lot, I could not help but raise my excitement level. Compounding the excitement of brand-recognition (shout out to the state of modern cinema) was the excitement of seeing if Brad Bird's streak of perfection in animated film could be carried into live action. And none of that is to mention the Burj Khalifa-scaling escapades depicted in every bit of the movie's marketing. Expectations were at an all-time high.

As usual, Futurama is able to capture my sentiments better than my own mind.

I will be spamming Brad Bird's twitter with this video for the next couple of months.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is not bad. Not by any means. It contains some stunning action choreography, incredible locales, and enough techno-porn to keep viewers warm until the inevitable next entry in the series. But it is disappointing. It is also, easily, the worst film in the series and contains perhaps the most mind-boggling creative oversight since Steven Spielberg cast Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom. Stick with me though, because I promise it's not all hate.

The pace of the film is apparent from the onset, as a sequence of helicopter shots race across the skyline of an Eastern European-looking city that some very ugly typeface informs us is Budapest. Suddenly, someone bursts out of a rooftop doorway, closely followed by armed goons who are quickly dispatched as their target leaps off the roof and, in one of the best shots of the year, shoots his pursuers while plummeting toward the ground. His fall is broken by a nifty backpack airbag type gadget, and he promptly gets up and begins to walk away, but is gunned down by a gorgeous woman that his phone, seconds late, informs him is an assassin.

All of that happens in about 30 seconds. And none of it makes any sense to the viewer. Aside from the aforementioned beautiful rooftop leap shot, the sequence is entirely pointless. The excuse could be made that the scene exists to hook the viewer; to let the audience know that something is afoot. The problem is, the audience already knows something is afoot. They are presently watching a movie called Mission: Impossible. Things tend to be afoot in films of this nature.

This counts as "afoot," right?

The film then completely switches gears and cuts to a prison which the same very ugly typeface (seriously, it's like Arial Narrow or something) informs us is in Moscow. An Impossible Mission Force (an acronym I was always amazed this series got away with) team is breaking series protagonist Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) out of a Russian prison. Ethan stubbornly insists on freeing another inmate for absolutely no narratively acceptable reason, and the whole crew escapes while a horrendously ugly title sequence plays a grossly misguided homage to the preview-clip title sequence of the original series. Aside from just being an ugly title sequence, the preview-of-whats-to-come is a great way to ruin dramatic irony for the rest of a movie. It destroys the dramatic irony in much the same way the number of parenthetical statements destroys the flow of this paragraph.

Thankfully it's over quickly, and the movie picks up. The opening sequence is explained, which momentarily helps ease the inelegance of its abruptness. Unfortunately, it becomes glaringly clear that the filmmakers were so desperate to both start with a bang and to get Tom Cruise's face onto the screen that they confined an essential bit of exposition to an awkward flashback and the previously discussed opening scene. A better route would have been to take a deep breath, tell the backstory in its entirety at the start of the film, let the tension build around why the dude who's on all the posters hasn't shown up for 15 minutes, then dramatically reveal Hunt when he's actually needed. As it stands, it works, but its incredibly clumsy, lazy and indicative of the attention spans at which the film is aimed.

Okay. Still with me? I know that seems like a lot of hate for 15 minutes of movie, but it was pretty bad way to start. Luckily, the film immediately recovers from its unfortunate beginning and starts to look something like a damn good spy-actioner. It turns out that IMF had to break Hunt out of prison because he was the only person who could... yadda yadda yadda. Not important. What is important: Nuclear weapons. Russians. Mystery bad guy. Tom Cruise scowling and not explaining why he was in a Russian prison to begin with.

So after a cool-gadget-laden infiltration scene and a painfully fake-looking explosion (see above), shit gets real, and Hunt and his team are off to Dubai. The focal point of the second act is Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and the insane acrobatics that such a location inspires in secret agents.

Sidenote: It's a good thing Mission: Impossible II already established Ethan Hunt as the world's best free-climber.

In stark contrast to the film's opening chapter, the second act is near perfect. It expertly weaves amazingly staged action set pieces with some classic Mission: Impossible role-switching hijinks, all of which culminate in a wonderfully executed chase scene through a sandstorm.

Enough cannot be said about the second act. It is blockbuster cinema at its absolute finest and it leaves you wondering how the movie can possibly top itself in the third act. Unfortunately, the movie is apparently wondering this too, because the third act nose dives right back into the crap of the first 15 minutes.

And therein lies the Kate Capshaw-sized misstep. Most movies, even comedies and musicals, rely on an escalation of tension and consequences throughout the entire story up until the breaking point; the climax. Especially in an action-thriller like this, both the tension and the consequences should be at their absolute peak in the third act. Regardless of how well-edited, choreographed and paced the climax might be, if Act 2 is set in the world's tallest building, the finale cannot, under absolutely any circumstances, take place in the electrical maintenance shed of a state-run TV station in Mumbai. The subconscious effect of the immensely underwhelming setting completely undermines any tension and sense of escalation.

In simple terms: You can't start big and end small.

And this is, like, as big as it gets.

It almost seems unfair to judge Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol as a whole. The jarring disparities in quality between its three acts make it feel as if it were three separate movies. It's like a delicious pulled pork sandwich on moldy sourdough; the middle is the only thing worth the money. Throw in some useless characters, a few incredibly corny lines and an atrociously bad post-game wrap up style ending, and you have the best Michael Bay movie ever made. Unfortunately, this isn't a Michael Bay movie. This is a Brad Bird movie, and he has set his own bar a bit too high for his live-action debut.

Ah, the curse of great expectations.


5.5/10